What Makes a Good Candidate for Test Automation?

Writing large UI based functional tests can be expensive in terms of money and time. It is sometimes hard to know where to focus your test budget. New features are good candidates, especially the most common successful and exceptional paths through the feature. But, when you have a monster legacy application with little to no coverage, where to get the biggest bang for the buck can be hard to ascertain.

Bugs, Defects, Issues…It Doesn’t Work

I believe bugs provide a good candidate for automation, especially if regression is a problem for you. Even if regression is not an issue, its always good to protect against regressions. So, automating bugs are kind of a win-win in terms of risk assessment. Hopefully, when a bug is found whoever finds the bug or whoever adds it to the bug database provides reproduction steps. If the steps are a good candidate for automation, automate it.

Analyzing Bugs

What makes a bug a good candidate for test automation? When analyzing bugs for automated testing I like to evaluate on 4 basic criteria. In descending order of precedence:

The steps are easy to model in the test framework.

The steps are maintainable as an automated test.

The bug was found before.

The bug caused a lot of pain to users or the company.

It is just common sense that “bug caused a lot of pain” is the top candidate. If a bug caused a lot of pain, you don’t want to repeat it, unless you like pain. Yet, if the painful bug is a maintenance nightmare as an automated test, the steps are hard to model, and the bug wasn’t found before you may want to just mark it for manual regression. If your test matches 2 or more of the criteria I’d say it is a high priority candidate for test automation.

Conclusion

These are just my opinion and there is no study to prove any of it. I know this has been thought of and pondered, maybe even researched by someone. If you know where I can find some good discussions on this topic or if you want to start one, please let me know.